Gnats Quotes

• And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Nice, Rain, Love You

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.8237, Delphi Classics

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• Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats.

  Victor Hugo

  Wisdom, Light, Enemy

  Victor Hugo (2008). “Things Seen and Essays”, p.67, Wildside Press LLC

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• Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes- all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.

  John Muir

  Life, Nature, Fun

  John Muir (2015). “John Muir: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth & Letters to a Friend (Autobiography With Original Drawings): The Memoirs of the Naturalist, Environmental Philosopher and Early Advocate of Preservation of Wilderness, the Author of The Yosemite, Travels in Alaska, The Mountains of California & Steep Trails”, p.73, e-artnow

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• Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play.

  John Muir

  Play, People, Savages

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• Towards gnats and fleas we should show no pity. We would do right to hang petty thieves, petty calumniators, and slanderers.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Criminals, Thieves, Fleas

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• Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who's sorry for a gnat or girl?

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Girl, Sorry, Fire

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Illustrated)”, p.957, Delphi Classics

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• People are not to be driven and you can put into a gnat’s eye all the souls of the children of men that are driven into heaven by preaching hell-fire.

  Brigham Young

  Children, Eye, Men

  Brigham Young (1861). “Journal of Discourses”

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• We must understand how to hide in darkness in order to escape the gnat-swarms of utterly annoying admirers.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Order, Darkness, Obscurity

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• There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Taken, Mean

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.11, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

  C. S. Lewis

  People, Ordinary, Gods And Goddesses

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.11, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

  C. S. Lewis

  People, Religion, Atheism

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Mere Christianity”, p.12, HarperCollins UK

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• Television is a triumph of equipment over people.

  Fred Allen

  People, Triumph, Television

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• Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.

  Fred Allen

  Art, Two, People

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• I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses ... We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o'clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.

  Zelda Fitzgerald

  Summer, Dog, Lying

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• What gnats are compared with humans, so is the whole creation compared with God.

  Saint John Chrysostom

  Creation, Humans, Whole

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• Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in law schools.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  School, Law, Camels

  "Stranger in a Strange Land".

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• I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.

  Jeff Daniels

  Thinking, Phones, Cells

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• By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Angel, Men, Sharks

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims”, p.74, Harvard University Press

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• It is not the bigness of anything in this kind that can hinder its motion, if the motive faculty be answerable thereunto. We see a great ship swims as well as a small cork, and an eagle flies in the air as well as a little gnat. 'Tis likely enough that there may be means invented of journeying to the Moon; and how happy they shall be that are first successful in this attempt.

  John Wilkins

  Mean, Successful, Moon

  "A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet". Book by John Wilkins, Book 1, Chapter 14, p. 238-239, 1640.

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• The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely ... Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer.

  Carl Jung

  Girl, Dream, Stars

  Carl Gustav Jung (2012). “Man and His Symbols”, p.90, Dell

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• Other people write about the bling and the booty. I write about the pus and the gnats. To me, that's beautiful.

  Vic Chesnutt

  Beautiful, Writing, People

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• Example is a dangerous lure: where the wasp got through the gnat sticks fast.

  Jean de La Fontaine

  Knowledge, Example, Sticks

  "La Fontaine's Fables" by Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, II, XVI, March 31, 1668.

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• There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Civilization, People

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.11, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber.

  James Agee

  Stars, Lying, Winter

  James Agee (2008). “A Death in the Family”, p.66, Penguin

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• I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.

  Lewis Thomas

  Knowledge, Science, Talking

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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